Nikon CLS, Wireless Flash System

Clarissa Santiago: Hey what’s up everybody? I’m Clarissa Santiago. Some of you might know me from the pageant of Latino-New York USA. Others might know me from being the American Princess on the official Reality Show, American Princess on ETV. All of you can find me at clarissasantiago.net. Today we are here at John Ricard studio and I am going to talk to you about lighting. Now of course John knows way more about lighting than I do, but wouldn’t you rather see me telling you about it? Well, first we’re going to start with lighting as I mentioned. See this big old thing here this lighting is used by a lot of photographers, for our especial type of lightning to meet the technique that we are going to try today. But this cost thousands of dollars and you do not need this to get the type of effect that we are going to show you today. So get ready because this is about to get real hot in here. And we are back, and what we have here today are three on camera flashes. We are going to be using this today to get the lightning affect that you would get from the big thousand dollars lens. So you will see the effect that we are about to do. The thing about it is a lot of you probably have this right in your own house. Well we are going to show you how to use the on camera flash technique at home wirelessly. That’s right no wires! Now you might be wondering why we have three flashes, well each one serves its purpose. The master flash is the one that we are going to use to slide right on to the camera. The master flash is going to control the power in our remote flashes. The first thing that we are going to do is take our master flash and out it in wireless mode. To do this, all we have to do is turn it on. Once it is on hold down the middle key. Once you are at the screen select master and hold until you are in wireless mode. So now that we have our wireless master ready to go, we want to change it to manual mode. In order to do that we are going to select the mode button and keep pressing it until you got the M from manual. So now that our master flash is set, we want to go ahead and set our remote flashes. In order to do that all you have to do is hold down the select button, hold down the select button to this screen. Once you are here, push it again and now we are going to scroll down to the world remote. Hold down the middle button again. So now this flash is in remote mode. Now we are going to set our second flash. So again we are going to hold down the middle button until we get the screen. Once we are here we going to hold it down again, we are going to select remote mode, push down the middle button and now both of our flashes are in remote mode. You might wonder why this flashes are in manual mode, well that is because this flashes operate in manual mode and not TTL. So we make this flash manual mode as well. So now that our camera is set up, and we got our master flash set on here. We want to pull the bounce cards so we that we make the lightning really soft. Then we want to put the remote flashes on both sides of our canvas here. We are going to take our remote flash and we are going to direct it towards the wall so that it will keeps the wall nice and white and there are in any channels. Now I am going to change, let us take some pictures. John Ricard: Alright Clarissa let us go, I will kind of let you go in your own for a minute, just do what is comfortable to you I’m not going to direct you. Clarissa Santiago: Okay, sounds great. Okay thank you so much for hanging out on me, remember I am Clarissa Santiago, clarissa-santaigo.net or. Or of course, the wonderful world of myspace.com/cs is the empress. So that concludes our show today, our three-light setup. Now you know how to do this lighting so go on to a good job. Make sure you let us know how it looks we want to see okay. And that is On Set with John Ricard! So make sure you tune in next time and we will talk about this wire here that basically—never mind we will leave it for the next show. Take care, bye! John Ricard: I am here at NY BJJ this where I train in Brazilian jujitsu in New York City. And I am doing some picture for him today and I am going to actually use the same system that Clarissa showed a few minutes ago. So what we have here is our Nikon D3 and our SP-800 flash. And then we have another flash here which is going to be bounced on to our white ceiling. And we have a second wireless flash set up here. And this is all we are going to be using to take these pictures. So there is a rather interesting mode on this flash that I like to use sometimes. So this is going to be the main flash the one that is mounted on the camera. I’m going to put it in to wireless mode now and I am going to tell the flash that it is the master. You see this little dotted line here, what that means is that this master flashes we’re going to trigger my A flash and my B Flash, but it is not going to add any light to the picture. I kind of like that mode because if I want to move closer to the subject or move further away I am not adding any light from my flash, because if I did each time I move closer like putting out more light, when I back up I’ll be putting out less light. So this gives me the freedom to move without really worrying about how much light I am putting up with the flash that is on the camera. All of the lightning is coming from my A flash here and my B flash here and I am going to start the light checks right now as Marcos and Vita work out the techniques. So let us just break the first technique down into four to six steps. And Marcos just let me know like step one step two and this is just the practice right now. [Demonstration] So you notice this system by having this flash set to the dashes here—I do not know if we see that the camera hopefully we are. Again, this flash is not putting out any light. All its doing is trigging flashes and that means move closer or further back without adding any light for this flash. You know the other thing you have to be careful of when you are bouncing light like this, like bouncing off the white wall I’m getting a problem because the wall isn’t really white and it’s producing a kind of orange tint. Usually I would have used the ExpoDisc attachment. You can look it up online I guess. You put the ExpoDisc on the lens that do a test shot for your white bounce. It gives you the correct colors. I didn’t do that today, so what I did instead was I left the ExpoDisc by mistake. So I’m shooting in raw mode down here. And in raw I can put it in light room or something and make a few adjustments to the color and get the skin a little bit better.